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All the important things that were left to simmer until after the election are now back on the stove, on "high." The administration that did not want to take a chance on burning the rice before the election now has to cook a double batch in half the time. It will be harder than ever to serve a decent meal.

Some issues are settled. Obamacare will shake up one-sixth of the economy, if the bureaucracy can make it work. The Dodd-Frank law will rule financial services, again if the bureaucracy can make it work.

But contentious issues will return in energy, immigration, housing, welfare, transportation, trade, and a slew of other topics. The next administration's challenges will look just like the last one's unfinished business.

In our $15 trillion economy, with its $3.8 trillion of federal spending, a "fiscal speed bump" would be more like it. It's not a serious reason for the panic that politicians intend to create.

The policies dubbed the fiscal cliff would cut projected spending by about 1% of GDP in fiscal 2013 and raise expected revenues by less than 5% of GDP.

Out of Proportion

Nearly all economists and lobbyists and politicians in the Washington area claim those policy changes would hurt the economy more than borrowing another trillion dollars or so and spending it. The Congressional Budget Office, for example, has an economic model that says inflation-adjusted GDP would contract at an annual rate of 1.4% in the first half of next year.

"Going over the fiscal cliff would mean allowing a massive and immediate cut to nearly every major government agency and activity, including those vital to our national security or economic growth," says Erskine Bowles, who led and lost the effort to construct a rational deficit-reduction plan in 2011.

Assuming that there are agencies vital to national security (none are vital to economic growth), there are none that could not withstand having 10% of their spending put off a year. And the automatic cuts won't stop Congress from approving supplemental and emergency defense appropriations (like the ones that provided off-budget financing for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).

As economist John Taylor reminds us, "The fiscal cliff was not created by aliens from outer space." Shortsighted solons created the fiscal cliff in 2011 to shock themselves into finding responsible alternatives later -- but "later" is now.

Lawmakers may respond to the shock and the pressure from interest groups, but there's no sign of sanity yet, unless you count a few ambiguous comments from House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama.

Americans can choose between the recession that looms if they go over the cliff, or the inflation that looms if they don't. Or they can have both at once, in a rerun of the 1970s.

A recession is preferable by far. Even the CBO says that its projected contraction in the first half of 2013 would be followed by a rebound to a real annual growth rate of 2.3% in the second half.

A Longer View

Beyond the fiscal cliff, reality looms in ways that were rarely discussed in the campaign. Remember how the foreign-policy debate kept coming back to "jobs, jobs, jobs"? Now that President Obama has the job for another term, foreign policy will resume its position as the part of his job where he can act freely.

With the exception of Ronald Reagan's second-term success on tax reform, most re-elected presidents since World War II (Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush II) have found their opportunities to make marks on history's tablet lay overseas.

As Obama told Dmitry Medvedev, then the Russian president, last March, "After my election I have more flexibility." He was talking about limiting missile defense, but it applies to other subjects as well.

A core principle of Democratic politics since Reagan's "Star Wars" project is that missile defense is a snare and a delusion. It will never work, they say, and if it does work it would destabilize relations with Russia. Obama's flexibility is likely to freeze missile defense; the issue of interest is what he will ask President Vladimir Putin to trade for killing it, if anything.

A more immediate problem is Iran, its soon-to-be-realized nuclear weapons capability and the concomitant capability of Israel -- which already has nuclear weapons -- to make a long-range strike on deeply buried facilities. After four years of chill, Israel and its plans are far beyond Obama's influence, but he will have to deal with the consequences of an attack, if one comes.

Eurovision

Europe may become the president's biggest problem, but he has even less control there. The hopeful muttering from European leaders about a euro that is indestructible will not help Obama cope with the repercussions when the euro is destroyed.

In the latest developments, Greece held a vote on austerity inside the parliament building while public sector unions staged a two-day strike, joined by lawyers, engineers, hospital staff, power workers, telecommunications workers, dentists, bank personnel, teachers, dockworkers, air-traffic controllers, and radio technicians.

"These are the very last painful measures," the prime minister promised, underscoring the ritual implausibility of the exercise. Greece needs more new money and it has to roll over some short-term debt in the next two weeks. Meanwhile, Spain and Italy are sinking into recession and France is digesting a new report calling for economic reforms to provide a "competitiveness shock" to the economy.

But the French government wants to maintain the purchasing power of households and help industry cut labor costs and cut the budget deficit and cut payroll taxes and avoid increasing the value-added tax.

Are the French getting to be more like Americans? The U.S. has very similar policy goals and very similar problems making ends meet.